Author Jerry Stahl didn’t know what his experience visiting Auschwitz would be like, but taking selfies with teenage strangers who had mistaken him for the actor who played Cosmo ‘Kramer’ on “Seinfeld” was definitely not on the list. Naturally, it was the very first thing that happened when he arrived.
“I just let them think I was Michael Richards,” he tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal podcast. “Meanwhile, this is the first day with this group of people I’m touring with and they’re looking at me like, what’s wrong with this guy? I’m over here taking selfies with like teenage girls. In my defense, I did not pretend to be Kramer, but it would be more of a drama to try to explain.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
This is one of the anecdotes he writes about in his book Nein, Nein, Nein: One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, which tackles his entire visit with, as Molly says, “a little piece of humor.”
Stahl explains that the humor just comes from him being real about how he felt and what he saw.
“One of the questions I have about these camps is how long after just some regular Joe or Yosef gets to the camp [does this] stuff, my ambition, my marriage, my kids, money, success, you know, how soon does that disappear?” he says. “I think one feels obligated to have these deep, sort of soul-destroying reactions. And what I felt was nothing I feel or think I feel is worthy of what really happened here. There was such a disconnect between not just what I felt, but what I thought I should feel and the reality on the ground with these other tourists going for the post-chamber pizza nachos.”
(He told Molly earlier in the episode that he saw a gift shop with magnets and people eating concessions on site. “It’s not like there’s a dress code, but I mean, people are walking around like family fun day in Orlando Disney World,” he says.)
But all of this, says Stahl, is what led him to his main takeaway.
“It occurred to me: They should just fence the thing off and people can walk by and look from a distance because my gut was [saying] ‘You’re dishonoring the dead by being here, buying refrigerator magnets.’ But on the other hand, who am I to judge?”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.